Junior Mints

Junior Mints are a candy brand consisting of small rounds of mint filling inside a dark chocolate coating, with a dimple on one side. The product is currently produced by Tootsie Roll Industries, and is packaged in varying amounts from the fun-size box to the much larger 12.0 oz. box.

Junior Mints were introduced in 1949 by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based James O. Welch Company. The company also manufactured candies and candy bars such as Sugar Babies, Welch's Fudge, and Pom Poms.

Welch was born in Hertford, North Carolina, attended the University of North Carolina, and then founded his Cambridge candy company in 1927. His partner in the company was his brother, Robert W. Welch, Jr., who retired from the confectionery business in 1956 and two years later founded the John Birch Society.

The name of the product is a pun on Sally Benson's Junior Miss, a collection of her stories from The New Yorker, which were adapted by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields into a successful play. The play was directed by Moss Hart and ran on Broadway from 1941 to 1943. According to one past official company history, when James Welch developed and launched the product in 1949, he named the candy after his favorite Broadway show. Yet the candy came six years after the play had closed on Broadway. Current copy on the Junior Mints box incorrectly gives the date of the Broadway play as 1949. Some may argue that this is comparable to the "potato potato" scenario, as depending on how you read "named after a top Broadway play in 1949: "Junior Miss"", it may be interpreted that it is simply referring to the candy being named in 1949.

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